Is that it? How online articles have changed over the past five years
BMJ 2002; 325 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.325.7378.1475 (Published 21 December 2002) Cite this as: BMJ 2002;325:1475All rapid responses
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Dear Dr. Delamothe,
Thank you for a fascinating look at the potential future of electronic
publishing. I fully agree with your Figure 2 which shows the disconnect
between prediction and reality. I would also like to elaborate on your
discussion of what users currently do with their downloaded articles.
As
you mentioned, “If this remains the limit of what users do, it makes the
whole online publishing project look like a not very interesting storm in
a teacup.” The article implies that if users were more technologically
savvy, they would use electronic versions of manuscripts, with their links
and other special capabilities, more often. However, I don’t think
“technology savvy” is the main obstacle. First, onscreen versions of
printed material, even those on PDA’s, are difficult to read from
different angles. They are especially difficult to share with a large
group (more than 2-3 people) unless they are projected onto a larger
screen. Further, it’s difficult if not impossible to make any margin
comments in the onscreen versions. There are also substantial limits to
how HTML versions of articles can be saved. Trying to “save” an HTML
version of article and retrieving it later often results in the loss of
most links, since the connections to these links may change over time or
is hierarchically dependent (ie, based on the location in the server). The
HTML versions are therefore difficult to archive and retrieve apart from
their website. They also usually look bad when they are printed out. I
would predict that until technology exists that allows users to download
manuscripts and read them in an easily retrievable, flexible, lightweight,
portable format that allows margin comments, the use of electronic
versions of manuscripts will remain relatively low.
There is some talk of
“E-books” with flexible LCD panels and “graffiti” like interfaces that may
solve some of these problems, depending on when they are widely available.
Sincerely,
Kevin C. Abbott, MD, FACP
LTC, MC
Director, Dialysis
Nephrology Service, Walter Reed Army Medical Center
Washington, DC, 20307-5001
EMAIL: kevin.abbott@na.amedd.army.mil
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
More details on the publishing plans of the Public Library of Science
were available only after we went to press.
Here's its press release:
Public Library of Science to Launch New Free-Access Biomedical
Journals with $9 Million Grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
December 17, San Francisco, CA. The Public Library of Science (PLoS),
a non-profit, international grass-roots organization of scientists,
announced today that it is launching a new scientific publishing venture
that will make the published results of scientific research more
accessible and useful to scientists, physicians and the public. This new
effort is backed by a five-year, $9 million grant from the Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation and by an important policy decision from the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute.
The PLoS initiative has been led by Dr. Harold E. Varmus, president
of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, former director of the
National Institutes of Health and 1989 Nobel Laureate; Dr. Patrick O.
Brown of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, and
Dr. Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence Orlando Berkeley National Laboratory and
the University of California, Berkeley.
PLoS will publish two new journals - PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine.
The senior editorial board of the new journals is an international group
of scientific luminaries (see list below). The PLoS journals will retain
all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous
peer-review and high editorial standards, but will use a new business
model in which the costs of these services are recovered by modest fees on
each published paper. This new model will allow PLoS to make all
published works immediately available online, with no charges for access
or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use.
"By making the published results of biomedical research available for
free, and allowing them to be redistributed and used without restriction,
these new journals will substantially increase the value - to both the
scientific community and the public - of the tremendous investment our
society makes in scientific research," explained Dr. Varmus.
Open access publication will:
· Greatly expand access to scientific knowledge by giving any
scientist, physician, student - or anyone with access to the Internet,
anywhere in the world - unlimited access to the latest scientific
research.
· Facilitate research, informed medical practice and education by making
it possible to freely search the full text of every published article to
locate specific ideas, methods, experimental results and observations.
· Enable scientists, librarians, publishers and entrepreneurs to develop
innovative new ways to access and use the information in this immensely
rich, but highly fragmented, resource.
According to Dr. Eisen, "Publication is fundamental to the process of
scientific and medical research, and the costs of publication are a small
but essential part of the cost of research. If the same institutions and
organizations that sponsor our research also committed to directly paying
journals for providing peer-review, editorial oversight and production,
the latest scientific discoveries could be made freely available online to
every scientist and physician or interested citizen in the world in
comprehensive, searchable open archives of the scientific literature.
The anachronistic system of giving away the copyrights to the original
research reports and then paying for access to them costs more and it
effectively deprives most of the world - including the people whose taxes
paid for the research in the first place - from having any meaningful
access to the results."
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), among the most highly
respected medical research organizations in the world, strongly endorsed
this new model for scientific publishing by promising to cover the
publication costs for their 350 investigators when they publish in open
access electronic journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. In so
doing, HHMI's scientific leadership - its president, Thomas R. Cech, a
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and vice presidents Gerald Rubin, Ph.D. and
David Clayton, Ph.D. - expressed their support for the PloS initiative,
and are helping to assure the success of PLoS's publications by
encouraging leading scientists to publish their work in open access
journals.
"We think that Web publications that are instantly available for free
and are readily searchable and downloadable very much support HHMI's
mission," said Dr. Cech. "They are clearly "the wave of the future" in
terms of our investigators disseminating their research discoveries and
learning from the findings of others. In addition, we have a strong
commitment to international science and the current subscription system
puts many journals out of the reach of our colleagues in poorer countries.
As noted by Dr. Varmus, "the generous support by HHMI is a strong
vote of confidence in our journals and serves as a model for other funding
agencies and institutions."
PLoS is confident that the scientific community will support their
new publications. In the past two years, more than 30,000 scientists from
180 countries signed an open letter circulated by PLoS, which called on
established scientific journals to provide open access to their archives.
Dr. Brown expects this initiative to be welcomed by many groups with a
stake in biomedical research. "Anyone who has an interest in the results
of scientific inquiry, or who believes in making the latest advances in
medical knowledge available to physicians and patients around the world,
can recognize the importance of more equitable access to the scientific
literature. When a woman learns she has breast cancer, she deserves to be
able to read the results of research on her treatment options that her own
tax dollars have funded. A physician in a public clinic in Uganda ought
to have the same access to the latest discoveries about AIDS prevention as
a professor at Harvard Medical School. And a precocious high school
student in Gary, Indiana who wants to read about the latest discoveries
from NIH-sponsored research in cell biology shouldn't have to pay
thousands of dollars for journal subscriptions."
CONTACT INFO
Adrienne Larkin: +1-650-724-4304
FAX: +1-415-358-4761
WEB: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org
Email: plos@publiclibraryofscience.org
Background:
Public Library of Science, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, was
formed in 2000 by a group of biomedical research scientists to encourage
scientific publishers to make the archival scientific research literature
available for distribution through free online public libraries of
science, such as NIH's pioneering online research library, PubMedCentral.
Partial List of Editorial Advisors:
We are currently contacting prominent scientist around the world who
strongly support the goals of PLoS to serve as editorial advisors to our
new journals. This is a partial list of those who have agreed to serve. An
updated list is available on our website:
Michael Ashburner, Ph.D.
University of Cambridge,
United Kingdom
Anne-Lise Borresen-Dale, Ph.D.
Norwegian Radium Hospital,
Norway
Patrick O. Brown, M.D., Ph.D.
,br>Stanford University School of Medicine,
United States
Steve Chu, Ph.D.
Stanford University,
United States
Nick Cozzarelli, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley,
United States
Sean Eddy, Ph.D.
Washington University of St. Louis,
United States
Michael B. Eisen, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,
United States
Mikhail Gelfand, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Russian Academy of Sciences,
Russia
Alan Fersht, Ph.D., FRS
University of Cambridge,
United Kingdom
Lee Hartwell, Ph.D.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center,
United States
David Hillis, Ph.D.
,br>University of Texas,
United States
Brigid Hogan, Ph.D.
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine,
United States
Fred Hughson, Ph.D.
,br>Princeton University,
United States
Marc Kirschner, Ph.D.
Harvard University Medical School,
United States
Rowenna Matthews, Ph.D.
University of Michigan,
United States
Roel Nusse, Ph.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine,
United States
Svante Paabo, Ph.D.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Germany
Richard Roberts, Ph.D.
New England Biolabs,
United States
Gerry Rubin, Ph.D.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
United States
Harold E. Varmus, M.D.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,
United States
Barbara Wold, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology,
United States
Competing interests:
The model pursued by the Public Library of Science threatens some of the revenues of my employer, the BMJ Publishing Group.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Reading paper
I'm going to nit-pick the previous posting, because I think it shows
some fundamental misconceptions.
(Rapid responses to an electronic posting are ... well, rapid, whcih
is good, and cheap which helps, but possibly an editor or a period on the
shelf would have picked these up. Paper responses are slow, expensive,
rarely juxtaposed to the article to which they respond, for future readers
of that article.)
"First, onscreen versions of printed material, even those on PDA’s,
are difficult to read from different angles."
Especially PDAs have narrow viewing angles. This is a feature, not a
bug, and helps preserve privacy, but privacy is not an issue here.
So what? These gadgets are for one person to read, not for a cinema
or a billboard. And ...
"... They are especially difficult to share with a large group (more
than 2-3 people) unless they are projected onto a larger screen."
Yes. Right, the way you share a BMJ (paper) article is 20 of you
line up and try to read it together? I think not.
In a library which has one copy of the BMJ, one person or maybe two
can read it together.
GIven that the electronic one can be accessed from anywhere there is a
screen, there is no sensible limit on the numbers of people who can read
it together.
" Further, it’s difficult if not impossible to make any margin
comments in the onscreen versions."
We are out of the library now, I take it?
This does require some tech savviness - there is Annotea (see the W3C
website for this) and a colelction of other annotation servers, there is
the Wiki technology which I recoomend to all of you, and there is nothing
to stop you making a copy, and annotating that, and by all means using the
margins if you like. By typing, so we may be able to read it when it is
projected (I apologise to anyone whose handwriting is better than mine,
alright, to everyone)
"There are also substantial limits to how HTML versions of articles
can be saved."
No. There are not.
"Trying to “save” an HTML version of article and retrieving it later
often results in the loss of most links, since the connections to these
links may change over time or is hierarchically dependent (ie, based on
the location in the server). "
Right... unlike the links in the paper version?
THose coming late to the on-line version will find that if the links
have moved, deliberately, then they will have the advantage of that
editing.
Many of us while declaring over and over to a largely unheeding paper
-based collection of administrators and finance directors that they
shouldn't muck about with links anyway would also say that saving the URL
is the ideal, and reviewing that article by going back to it, not by
freezing it in time on your own hard drive.
"The HTML versions are therefore difficult to archive and retrieve
apart from their website. They also usually look bad when they are printed
out."
This still doesn't make sense. If you archive an article you archive
all parts of it, no? So if the linked pages are part of the document you
have archived them along with the core of it, no? If you didn't archive
them, they were something else.
If they are fascinating references to elsewhere then how does this
differ from paper? Here is a reference: Encylopaedia Brittanica, page
2003 . What are you going to do with it? Buy another copy of volume 1 of
the Micropaedia to file along with the torn out page this is on? Of
course not. WHether it is to a book, another paper in another issue, or
another journal then you rely upon being able to find a copy of the
original using the navigational/indexing information provided in the
link/reference you are given.
And... get a decent printer. Opera tends to print HTML pages better
than does Internet Explorer, in my opinion, but the main things involved
are the printer and the oeprating system. The BMJ can afford a nice
printer, but a laser is adequate.
"I would predict that until technology exists that allows users to
download manuscripts and read them in an easily retrievable, flexible,
lightweight, portable format that allows margin comments, the use of
electronic versions of manuscripts will remain relatively low"
Well, that technology exists, and you are allowed to print things
out... which takes care of the screen resolution problem.
But you are only thinking of one use - sequential prompt reading.
Paper is appallingly bad for rapid accesss to a specific point at the
time of need, and since these are usually small sections the difference in
readability between screen and paper doesn't show up much.
As one bit of techi-ness to reflect upon, many articles published on
line look as if they have headings, but don't. So the speed-reading which
is so easy to do as you flick from heading to heading - easier than on
paper - is hampered, as is any use of the structure of the document. That
can be improved, but paper has plateaued.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests